The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors

Trying to rigorously answer fundamental questions is kind of the whole point of philosophy, and Mr. Long and Jeff Sebo, an N.Y.U. philosopher who specializes in animal welfare, soon collaborated to write “Taking A.I. Welfare Seriously,” a paper arguing that it was important to avoid harming A.I. systems if they “matter morally,” and also important not to care for systems if they don’t. Later, with funding from three foundations aligned with the Effective Altruism movement, Mr. Long and a colleague set up a nonprofit, Eleos AI Research.

The people who founded Eleos started out by trying to figure out our moral obligations toward AI, or whether we should have them at all.

For ethicists, in particular, A.I. is a bonanza. How should models act toward us? How should humans interact with them? Where would purpose come from in a post-work society?

All good questions, but in my opinion we’re missing key questions about the environmental ethics here.

The middle third of the article is about a group of researchers at Eleos who are testing different models for sentience.

Then there’s this:

Mr. Long and his team also feel an urgency of the soul. If A.I. were to be conscious and capable of suffering, the world would be at risk of committing a moral atrocity, witting or not, on an unprecedented scale by essentially confining an A.I. in a tiny pen, thwarting its desires, shutting it down against its wishes and forcing it to act against its values…

Mr. Long himself thinks it’s dangerous to impute more capability to models than they have. The Eleos bookshelf contains works by the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith and the neuroscientist Anil Seth arguing that consciousness derives from evolution and biology and is unlikely to emerge on silicon. But Mr. Long doesn’t see why anyone should have a problem with a handful of philosophers, in an exponentially growing industry, focusing on questions of A.I. welfare. Even skeptics of A.I. consciousness have made the pragmatic case that if we’re worried about a potentially malign A.I., it’s in our interest to care how it feels, or even just “feels.”

Yes, it’s a fairly long piece for the Times, and it mentions the one (!) woman who seems to be responsible for Claude’s moral compass. But the bulk of this article is about Robert Long and his team at Eleos, and their focus appears to be the well-being of the machine.

(I recognize that the journalist has an angle here, so the article may only be representing one facet of their work.)